We arrived in Crete 2 days ago and were taken to our hotel in Herakaion. It’s in the middle of the night life area and we were a bit worried about the bustle surrounding the place, but things have worked out. The first day here we mostly walked around the town and we saw the local archeology museum. Our second day consisted of renting a car and driving all over the west side of the island. We saw several nice beach cities along the Cretan sea, and not much of anything along the Libyan Sea. The highlight of the day had to be going to a monastery in the middle of nowhere. They had quite a nice museum, the icons were incredible. Some of them were also very old. If you walk around Greece enough, you’ll see a bunch of tourist icons. You might even see “church stores” where you can buy actual, new icons. The ones in the museums and monasteries are really in a different class, seek them out.
We got a shock when we got back to the hotel, the whole city square (which our hotel is on) was going crazy. Flags waving, fireworks, air horns, news crews, and lots and lots of people. It turns out that they had a country wide election that day, and the headquarters of the party that came out ahead was right next to our hotel… Cars and motorcycles were driving all over the place with Greek flags fluttering and horns blowing, it was quite a scene. We eventually fell asleep, the festivities seemed to die out around midnight or so.
That second day was spent in the car mostly. We saw some really nice scenery, but there was never a good place to pull over. Besides, I still wasn’t feeling 100%, the day is a big blur for me… I’m trying to put some pictures up..